


We'll All Be One In Glory

by laetificat



Category: Temeraire - Naomi Novik, The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Alternate Universe - Temeraire Fusion, Gen, Survival Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 15:22:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19212190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laetificat/pseuds/laetificat
Summary: The dragon swung her head above him, peering at him through one narrowed eye. The feathers that bristled over her sides rippled in the warm summer breeze. Crozier gripped his hat beneath his arm, trying to ignore the sweat running down his spine beneath his dress uniform.“Of course I would be pleased to consider you, Mr. Crozier,” she said. “I’ve been told you served on the Parry expeditions in ‘21 and ‘24. I’ve asked my midshipmen to prepare some charts of that journey, perhaps we could discuss them?”





	We'll All Be One In Glory

**Author's Note:**

> this has been lurking in my WIP folder for a long time, so I'm pleased to finally get to an ending with it!
> 
> I've fudged some of the dates for the sake of the timeline. it's also ended up as a bit of a fusion between the book and show canon, so could be read as either.
> 
> the title comes from Sir Henry Newbolt's poem, _The Fighting Téméraire_.

_October 1847_

The polar nights were not quite dark, once one’s eyes became accustomed. The vaulted ceiling of the sky overhead had a faint and eerie glow, as if hoarding the faintest reflected luminescence from the endless frozen waste; the last memories of sunlight. There was blackness, true darkness, but it was pooled within the deep crevices and cracks in the ice, jagged edges glittering like tiny stars. Looking at it, Crozier occasionally felt he was walking upside-down, his feet in the sky and his head towards the Earth.

He shrugged deeper into the collar of his coat, breath steaming in the light of the torch his men had jammed into the ice to mark the path between Erebus and Terror. The wind was bitter, snow crystals stinging his exposed skin. Still, it was a good walk, a good time to clear his mind, digest Sir John’s meagre dinner and think -- or not think, as he was presently doing. 

Not thinking about another long winter on the ice. Not thinking about Blanky’s warnings and Goodsir’s wounded, loyal eyes. Not thinking about the noises he heard, distantly, between the muffled shrieks and groans of the moving pack.

Crozier half-walked half-slid down the side of a particularly large ice shelf, only skidding slightly as he reached the bottom, and finally came within sight of Terror. As always, the sight of her made his chest feel a little tighter, a weight settling on his shoulders and lifting his heart at the same time. 

He made his customary approach, detouring a little to walk close to her head. The crewman on duty nodded and knuckled his forehead in greeting, his face shadowed under his heavy knitted cap. The circle of wan golden light from the lantern nearby made the area he guarded seem almost like a shrine.

Terror hadn’t moved much over the last week or so. The men diligently cleared snow drifts from around her massive body, but it was getting harder to see where she ended and the ice began. As he came towards her, a single eye -- the size of a large serving platter -- opened a crack, frost flaking away. A thin cloud of steam and ice crystals billowed out from her ice-rimmed nostrils. 

Not caring for the risk of frostbite or the example he was setting to the men on duty, Crozier reached out a hand and rested it briefly on the bony ridge just above her eye.

“I’m sorry, old girl,” he murmured. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Terror gave a deep rumble in response -- Crozier could no longer tell if she was attempting to speak -- and her eye slid closed once more. Crozier stood for a moment, head bowed, fist held against his chest. 

No matter how this ended, no matter whether they managed to claw their way out of this Godsforgotten darkness or not, he knew would never be able to escape the knowledge that he had brought the dragon to her death in this Arctic wasteland. 

*

_November 1846_

At rest, the backs of the dragons resembled those of gargantuan tortoises, bristling with the fabric and wood structures that made up their winter housing. Much of this was for the protection and preservation of the dragons themselves -- the massive coal stoves that rested between their shoulders, providing enough warmth to keep their bodies functioning; windbreaks to keep the worst of the ice storms from damaging their wing structures -- while also providing a degree of comfort for their crews.

The dragons spent the winter months in a state that the surgeons said was close to hibernation, similar to that of smaller reptiles. They slept deeply, waking perhaps once every couple of weeks in order to move themselves slightly and take in some water and food. This trait was inherited from their ancestors, huge half-feral and heavily feathered beasts who spent their entire lives in the far Northern steppes of Russia and Asia. Since the acquisition of pair by the British corps in the 1700’s and with some careful cross-breeding through the Regal Copper lines, these had produced a breed of dragon which -- it was theorised -- could survive even the very coldest conditions.

*

_February 1848_

The gun was slick with oil, freezing cold even through his gloves. The motions of loading it, preparing the power, the shot, the fuse, were familiar enough to Crozier that he didn’t have to think about them. 

Instead, he thought of sunlit days in England before their first Arctic expedition, patrolling the channel or in the covert in Dover, bonding with the dragon who was never precisely his. He had been surprised at how quickly he'd taken to her. She had none of the gentleness of Hecla or the silliness of Doterel -- Dotty, she insisted, to her crew -- on whom he had served before getting his step. 

Terror had an acerbic wit and tended to be thoughtful, almost distant, with her crew. She spent much of her time with the other dragons, seemingly preferring their company to that of humans. Still, she was as covetous of her people as any dragon even if she did not show it, and oversaw their duty rosters with a keen eye and a knowledge of tactics that Crozier had not seen before in any beast. 

He remembered well their first meeting when she had demanded an interview of him, saying that she refused to have a captain who did not know his work. When he had listed his previous experience, especially his part in the Ross expeditions and friendship with Ross himself, she had started up with a sharp interest and asked at once for him to tell her every detail. He had found himself surprised and pleased to have such an audience, and sent for his journals from that time to read to her. This had quickly become a tradition for them and he would often end his days at her side, discussing her favourite entries or speculating together on the nature of the Passage.

He thought of those moments now, the sound of her voice and the warmth of her forearm beneath him. The shelter of her wing had made him feel secure as no other berth had in all his years. 

*

_July 1847_

Peddie pulled the edge of the blanket down over the face of the dead man. 

“Just like the others, Sir John,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag and dropping it into the bucket beside his feet. “Something tore into him. Something big, judging by the lacerations on his torso. The men still haven’t recovered his..” he paused and cleared his throat, “lower half.”

Crozier rubbed his hand across his face, a futile attempt to banish the headache which had been pounding through his skull for the last two days. Fitzjames glanced at him from the other side of the tent and frowned, concerned. 

“You’re sure this wasn’t the work of an ice bear?” Sir John asked. He had picked up a glass marble from the dead midshipman’s effects and was rolling it back and forth between his finger and thumb.

Peddie shrugged. “If it was, it was a very large ice bear. Large enough to give the dragons a run for their money, I’d say. But I’m admittedly not an expert on human anatomy, Sir John.” 

Crozier cleared his throat. Sir John looked up. “Terror hasn’t reported seeing or smelling any ice bears for weeks.”

“It’s natural for bears to avoid the dragons,” Sir John replied, waving a dismissive hand. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. Double the watches and tell the men I’ll provide a reward for the head of the beast responsible. And find that damned woman. Let’s get this nasty business over with quickly.”

*

_November 1847_

Crozier lay in the sweating darkness. The dream pounded against the inside of his skull. Always the same dream. The wet ice, the blood, the great hulking figure filling the grey-clouded sky above him as he knelt in supplication. Bigger than any dragon, bigger than the world, staring down at him with eyes of flame. Silent. Waiting.

He floated in the dream; somewhere his body was wracked with fever and shaking, both poisoned and missing the poison, his consciousness a diseased limb cut off to save the rest. He sobbed; cried out, perhaps.

Somewhere, throughout the long days and longer nights, between Jopson’s visits, a great drum beating. Not his heart, no. A greater heart. A soft muzzle beneath his fingertips; a wash of warm breath over his freezing hands. He heard it even through the floor of his tent, through his bed and blankets. 

He drifted, unmoored; Terror’s heartbeat the only thing keeping him lashed to the world.

*

_July 1839_

The dragon swung her head above him, peering at him through one narrowed eye. The feathers that bristled over her sides rippled in the warm summer breeze. Crozier gripped his hat beneath his arm, trying to ignore the sweat running down his spine beneath his dress uniform.

“Of course I would be pleased to consider you, Mr. Crozier,” she said. “I’ve been told you served on the Parry expeditions in ‘21 and ‘24. I’ve asked my midshipmen to prepare some charts of that journey, perhaps we could discuss them?”

*

_January 1848_

In the darkness, Silence was a shadow beside a greater shadow. Lieutenant Irving knuckled his forehead as Crozier approached, the light of the lantern glinting in his eyes. Snow drifted down around them, flakes tumbling and glowing in the golden light.

“She’s been out there since the second watch, sir,” he muttered, glancing back over his shoulder at Silence. The Esquimaux woman was kneeling beside Terror’s head, her mittened hands resting on Terror’s cheek. “I don’t think she’s causing any trouble, she just stays there, not moving. I think I heard her.. singing. Or humming, kind of.”

Crozier nodded absently, his eyes snagged on the form of Silence penitent before the slumbering dragon. Remembering the way Peddie -- cheeks hollow, blood spotting his hairline -- had shrugged, the day before, when Crozier had asked him about their chances. 

“I would say her legs are almost certainly broken,” he’d murmured, chafing his hands together over the shallow candle flame. “Maybe her ribs too. The way the ice has her. Even if it melted, she wouldn’t last long.” He’d cleared his throat; coughed. Glanced up to meet Crozier’s eye and then away. “I’m sorry to say it, sir. At least, I don’t believe she feels the pain.. These dragons, they sleep so deeply. It’s how they were bred.”

I don’t believe. Fragile words, to hold so much. What did any of them believe, now? What was left to believe? 

The snow, falling golden on Silence’s shoulders. He could hear the song now, or at least he thought so; more like a moan than true singing, a low, mournful keen.

“Sir?” Irving cleared his throat. “Should I ask her to stop?”

Crozier shook his head. “No. Let her be.”

*

_August 1845_

Crozier leaned out over Terror’s shoulder, watching the dragon’s shadow race across the foam-flecked sea below. The icy wind of their flight needled through the layers of cloth protecting his face, burrowing beneath the edge of his flying goggles. Gripping a grease pencil in half-frozen fingers, he jotted down a notation in the ledger strapped to the back of his forearm.

“Signal from Erebus, sir,” Evans piped up, “two points to starboard.”

“Very good, Evans. Did you hear that, Terror?” 

Terror turned her head slightly, fixing him with her lambent green gaze. “I hear,” she replied, her voice echoing oddly through the great chambers beneath his feet. She snorted a plumed breath, swinging her head back. “I hope the hunting will be better this time.”

Wings snapping with the sound of an unfurling sail, she angled herself towards the small spit of land which rose out of the waters like the cresting back of some much larger beast. It was rocky and desolate, but it was exactly what the dragons needed after a long day on the wing. Although their speed was prodigious compared to sailing ships, their weight and size -- the blubber necessary to keep them alive in the Arctic -- meant they had to seek land to rest each night. So the journey to the Northwest Passage was not a straight line, but a series of carefully managed hops from island to inlet.

Their course had been roughly plotted to take advantage of the predicted movements of the seal colonies which spent their summer drifting back and forth across the waters, pursued by a loyal following of trappers and hunters. But these colonies -- which in Crozier’s experience usually crowded the rocks in great stinking hoards -- had yet to materialise in any significant numbers. The dragons, unable to fish or hunt on the wing with their heavy burdens, were growing hungry. The men were already on limited rations, augmenting their diet of salt-packed seal meat with the tinned food that had been intended for their winters on the ice. 

Crozier watched the narrow shard of beach rise out of the cobalt waves ahead of them. It would be big enough for the dragons to stand on, but little more than that. And there were no seals at all.

*

_March 1847_

The mouth of the tunnel was well hidden in the shadows of the breaching ice. Crozier would not have spotted it at all had Lieutenant Little not pointed it out, kneeling down to cast the light of his lantern over the scuffs and scrapes in the snow that demarcated recent passage. Someone had jammed a tiny scrap of cloth into a crack in the ice nearby, almost invisible unless you were looking for it.

Green wool, from the hem of an aviator’s coat.

“It’s only big enough for one man at a time,” Little murmured. Lieutenant Hodgson brushed snow from the lip of the tunnel as James Thompson, chief of the ground crew and their best engineer, crouched down to peer inside.

“Tighter than a Longwing’s throat hole in there, sir,” he commented, looking back over his shoulder and scratching at his frost-rimed beard. “I wouldn’t want to get stuck if it decided to come down. Though it’d save on burial detail.”

Crozier smiled grimly. “Nevertheless, I want to see where it goes. Pass me a lantern.” 

“Sir --” Hodgson began to protest. 

“The lantern, and keep your voices down.”

Frowning, Little handed over his lantern, the metal handle well wrapped against the cold which could strip a man’s skin from his palm in seconds. Crozier crouched at the mouth of the tunnel. The walls weren’t smooth. Rather, they took advantage of natural fissures and curves in the ice, occasionally scratched and hacked away where these cracks were too thin. Crozier was reminded of rats trying to get into a barn. Starving, desperate rats. A feeling of foreboding rose in his gut.

Slowly, he edged into the tunnel, hearing Lieutenant Little close behind him. His breath fogged in the light of the lantern. At first there was enough room to walk, stooped, but shortly they had to crawl, edging through the smallest gaps. The ice underfoot was gritty and there was presently a strong smell of spirits.

Eventually Crozier reached the end of the tunnel, half frozen, scored in a dozen places by the jagged edges of the ice. He put a hand out to what he initially thought was another part of the ice, then almost jumped back when he recognised the feel of dragon hide even through the layers of his gloves. 

“What on God's earth -- ” he began, then happened to glance down and caught sight of a familiar instrument cast carelessly into the floor of the tunnel, as if by a panicked hand dropping it before fleeing. A set of tongs, and beside it a chisel and hammer, and the slightly oversized and reinforced scalpel used by the dragon surgeons to make incisions in order to retrieve gunshot. 

A sickening feeling rose in Crozier's stomach as he lifted the lantern and beheld the series of wounds criss-crossed over Terror's hide, some still leaking dark sluggish blood onto the ice. The edges of some were ragged, more holes than cuts.

Rats. Crozier’s headache redoubled behind his eyes. Desperate, starving rats.

As if from a distance he heard Little come up behind him and then murmur “oh, oh Christ” in a thin voice. 

Christ, Crozier thought, turning the lantern away from Terror's side, could not help them now.

*

_August 1847_

Erebus raised her wings a little, muscles cracking, allowing the storm chains to slide into clanking piles on the ice. Crozier pretended not to see the tight, unhappy expressions on the faces of the men. They hadn’t liked seeing Erebus confined. Her ugly, thunderous grief at the violent death of Sir John had been an outlet for their own fear. The great clawed rents in the ice around the hole where Sir John had disappeared -- dragged down by the terrible unknown creature -- still glistened in the weak midsummer sunshine. They had recovered most of what had remained of the crew buildings, the supplies and the stove and had begun to rebuild the camp on the leeward side of Erebus’ body.

Fitzjames shook his head, avoiding Crozier’s eye, and stepped away to talk to the ground crew. Crozier stalked across the ice to where Erebus was carefully lowering herself back into the position she had been lying in for nearly six long months. Her skin hung loose on her bones, giving her the appearance of a half-raised tent. Her legs shuddered beneath her; the surgeons thought she would likely never support herself fully again, even if by some miracle they found salvation.

She rolled her eye towards Crozier, lips parting around a mouthful of yellow teeth each as long as his forearm. Crozier stopped in his tracks, suddenly very aware of the disproportionate nature of their sizes.

Erebus snorted a cloud of steam, seemingly amused. “Now you fear me, Francis?” She turned her head away from him, settling her chin into the snow crusted yellow with her oils and saliva. 

“You should have let me follow him. So I could die with him.” She heaved a sigh, the sound like a storm wind rippling through a stand of trees. “Instead, we two will die together.”

That set the men within earshot to muttering. Fitzjames looked back over his shoulder and met Crozier’s gaze, concerned. Crozier gritted his teeth, stepping closer to the dragon, beginning to raise his hand to touch her and then thinking better of it. 

“Erebus, please,” he whispered, almost a prayer.

Erebus let out another sigh, the sound rattling somewhere in her immense lungs. 

“Do not speak to me again, Francis.”

*

_June 1845_

Erebus shook her head, spraying water over the men working on the beach. Most reacted with lighthearted curses, well used to her antics after months aboard her. The early summer sunlight sparkled on her feathered sides and beaded on her wings as she hauled herself out of the sea, already casting her gaze around for her Captain. 

“John,” she called, lifting one leg to allow her ground crew to inspect her heavy harness, “I mislike the way those clouds look, I believe we’re in for a squall.” 

Sir John Franklin raised a hand to acknowledge her, barely glancing up from the map he had stretched over a table in the shade of his tent. Lieutenant Fitzjames chuckled, leaning back in his chair.

“I swear, Sir John, she gets it almost to the hour every time.”

“As well she should,” Franklin replied, still absorbed in his reading, “being a creature of the sky.”

Crozier stood beside them, nursing a glass of whisky and watching the men working to unload the last items from the dragon transport. The Dauntless would be able to follow them no further, being too large and heavy for the dragons to pull through the dense ice of the Passage. From here on out, they would be alone.

He raised his eyes and almost without trying found Terror, silhouetted against the sun high above the sea camp. She often enjoyed the chance to fly unburdened, especially when that freedom was soon to be denied her in the long days ahead. Crozier had learned quickly not to feel put out by her aloof nature. He was her second Captain, unrelated by blood, so it was natural that they would not be close. He did not begrudge her the need to be independent, nor the portrait of the late Captain Back that she kept in her belly rigging. 

Still, he occasionally found himself wondering how things would be different had he been the one to catch her in his hands, wet from the shell.

*

_February 1848_

Crozier checked the gun, again, though he knew he had loaded it properly. 

He remembered her heartbeat, that had carried him through his sickness. 

“If I only I could do the same for you, my darling,” he said, though he knew Terror could no longer hear him. The surgeons had been expecting her death for some weeks, brought about by the crushing ice and the privation. But she still held on to some scrap of life, somewhere deep in her great and broken body. Crozier knew that she was only awaiting permission to go. 

He set the muzzle of the gun to the back of her skull, where even a small bullet would pierce vital sacs. The place all captains protected with their life if necessary.

Instinct made him glance one last time out into the dark, though even in daylight he knew he would not be able to see Erebus beyond the great snags of ice that now separated the two dragons. A line of torches stretched out along the ridges, guiding the crew as they made the march to their new camp. The surgeons thought Erebus might last another month or so, and that the men would benefit from the fading warmth of her body, stretching their own chances out a few precious weeks. 

"Forgive me." 

Crozier tightened his finger on the trigger.


End file.
